March is the customary month when we celebrate International Women’s Day. The occasion calls us to reflect on our Mission for and with women. In our ongoing journey of integrating faith with justice, our relationship with women becomes one of the central concerns of our personal and apostolic life. GC 33 in a brief mention of “unjust treatment and exploitation of women” drew our attention to it. GC 34 in a pioneering spirit made it explicit and categorical through an exclusive Decree (14) that invited Jesuits to engage dynamically and prophetically in responding to the situation of women in the Church and civil society. As the cultural language and symbols of women exploitation across the world change from coarser to subtler manifestations, we are challenged to examine our response to the plight of women today in a renewed way. Women are definitely direct and indirect beneficiaries of many of our noble apostolic endeavours. How directly and centrally are we engaged in ministries or movements exclusively for and with women?

A dynamic nun who accompanied me to a village for the Eucharist in a mission centre during my pastoral year, refused to arrange the altar, reminding me that she had not become a nun to arrange the altar for priests. Initially shocked, I thanked her for pointing out the streak of “pseudo-feminism’ in me. I proudly called myself a feminist while a certain subtle, demeaning attitude was present in me that did not align with genuine feminism. While we enjoy in the Society of Jesus the apostolic vision and personal freedom of relationship with women, don’t we need to ensure that the reason for their security in us is our genuine and deep-seated respect for their gender more than any of our own need? Without this our position on feminism or gender sensitivity would border around a pseudo-ism that may be camouflaging an inbuilt chauvinism!

Tensions with women religious in mission stations are jokingly, but poignantly, expressed by calling their territory ‘Pakistan’ and ours ‘India’!! Collaboration with women (religious or secular) must be a specific component in our vision and in our strategies for lay collaboration. Negligence of women representation in our apostolic structures is sometimes a symptom of the hidden gender hegemony in us. Collaboration and subjugation do not go together. Women continue playing subservient roles in the Church and society. Women sticking their neck out may not be received sportingly, perhaps be even mocked at. Virginia Woolf in “A Room of One’s Own” cautions us: “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

All our apostolic endeavours surely must have a perspective on behalf of the marginalized but especially on behalf of women because they constitute 49.6 % of the total human population. Our apostolic processes of planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation could pass through a feminist screening or scrutiny. The rampant exploitation and commodification of women across the world, especially in countries of South Asia, certainly calls for our advocacy on their behalf. Injustices, atrocities, insults, and all forms of dehumanisation of women that continue, if not gone berserk, beckon us to recall the forgotten call of GC 34. Why should the work of women emancipation be relegated to women themselves even if with support from the outside?

Maybe we are still fighting shy of a collective apostolic aggressivity in our mission for and with women, leaving it to some individuals who show a passion for it.

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